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Box builds a digital hub to help fight content fragmentation

The interconnectedness of the cloud has allowed us to share content widely with people inside and outside the organization and across different applications, but that ability has created a problem of its own, a kind of digital fragmentation. How do you track how that piece of content is being used across a range of cloud services? It’s a problem Box wants to solve with its latest features, Activity Stream and Recommended Apps.

The company made the announcements at BoxWorks, its annual customer conference being held this week in San Francisco,

Activity Stream provides a way to track your content in real time as it moves through the organization, including who touches it and what applications it’s used in, acting as a kind of digital audit trail. One of the big problems with content in the cloud age is understanding what happened to it after you created it. Did it get used in Salesforce or ServiceNow or Slack? You can now follow the path of your content and see how people have shared it, and this could help remove some of the disconnect people feel in the digital world.

As Jeetu Patel, Box’s Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer points out, an average large company could have more than a thousand apps and there is no good way to connect the dots when it comes to tracking unstructured content and getting a unified view of the digital trail.

“We integrate with over 1400 applications, and as we integrate with those applications, we thought if we could surface those events, it would be insanely useful to our users,” he said. Patel sees this as the beginning of an important construct, the notion of a content hub where you can see the entire transaction record associated with a piece of content.

Activity Stream sidebar inside Box. Photo: Box

But Box didn’t want to stop with just a laundry list of the connections. It also created deep links into the applications being used, so a user can click a link, open the application and view the content in the context of that other application. “It seems like Box was a logical place to get a bird’s eye view of how content is being used,” Patel said, explaining Box’s thinking in creating this feature.

A related feature is a list of Recommended Apps. Based the Box Graph, and what Box knows about the user, the content they use, and how it’s interconnected with other cloud apps, it also displays a list of recommended apps right in the Box interface. This lets users access those applications in the context of their work, so for instance, they could share the content in Slack right from the document.

Recommended Apps bar inside Box. Photo: Box

For starters, Recommended Apps integrations include G Suite apps, Slack, Salesforce, DocuSign and Netsuite, but Patel says anyone who is integrated with the web app via the API will start showing up in Activity Stream.

While the products were announced today, Box is still working out the kinks in terms of how this will work. They expect these features to be available early next year. If they can pull this off, it will go a long way toward solving the digital fragmentation problem and making Box the content center for organizations.

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AirTM raises $7 million to fight hyperinflation

If you want to convert Netflix gift cards into dollars on a PayPal account, you usually have to find someone willing to do the same transaction in the other direction. It can quickly go wrong if you never receive your money.

Meet AirTM, a service that makes it easier to convert any form of money into any other form of money. You can deposit money using banks, gift cards, cash through Western Union and other equivalent services, cryptocurrencies and more. You can withdraw money through any of those protocols as well. AirTM is raising a $7 million Series A with BlueYard leading the round.

While many of you probably don’t see why you’d use a service like this, AirTM’s users in Venezuela are willing to pay high fees to convert their bolívars into anything else. Multiple years of hyperinflation have turned everyone’s savings into piles of bills that are worth close to nothing.

AirTM accounts aren’t bank accounts. When you create an account, you get an e-wallet in AirUSD. You can deposit and withdraw money as well as send and receive money. Depending on your payment method, you’ll get different fees.

For instance, there’s a huge supply of money from PayPal, which means that you’ll pay quite a lot to deposit money using PayPal and convert it into AirUSD.

While AirTM sounds great for money laundering, the company is a registered money service business and follow anti-money laundering and know-your-customer requirements. The company is just getting started as it manages $9 million in monthly transaction volume with 4,000 daily active users. But it’s clear that it has the potential of creating an alternative to traditional banking in countries with volatile currencies.

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Never leave the basement again with this stupid opulent gaming chair

There’s no price yet on Acer’s new gaming chair, but even the “Predator Thronos” name suggests that you’ll be paying a year’s salary for the honor of taking one home. The Thronos is more appliance than gaming accessory, really, weighing in excess of 485 pounds.

The whole thing suggests some old school smokey VR arcade. It’s really a kind of self-contained, motorized cockpit with a seat that reclines 140 degrees, to peep up to three 27-inch monitors. It’s stupid and extravagant and kind of cool and probably half the size of my New York City apartment.

Yes, the chair vibrates and the whole thing lights up and maybe it could double as a half decent massage chair, if you’re looking for a way to justify the expenditure to your significant other who just doesn’t have the same kind of lifelong passion for flight simulators as you. Or maybe you can sleep on it when you get in trouble for spending a few months’ rent on a gaming chair. 

No word on availability or pricing, or Thronos’ quest to retrieve the final Infinity Stone and destroy half of the universe.

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Sinemia takes aim at MoviePass again, with new $9.99 plan

Sinemia continues its campaign to take advantage of MoviePass’s high-profile struggles and win over the better-known movie ticket subscription service’s customers. Today, it announced a new plan priced at $9.99 per month.

MoviePass, after all, recently announced that it would be keeping its monthly subscription price at $9.95, but limiting subscribers to three movies per month (with discounts on additional tickets).

The new Sinemia tier also includes three tickets each month, but it has the additional benefit of allowing subscribers to buy tickets for any 2D, non-IMAX screen, and to buy those tickets in advance. MoviePass, in contrast, is rotating the available movies each day, and it requires subscribers to buy their tickets at the theater, on the same day as the screening.

Just a couple weeks ago, Sinemia announced a refer-a-friend program that rewards subscribers who convince their friends to leave other subscription services. The company makes no secret of the fact that it’s targeting MoviePass in particular — in today’s announcement, it describes the new plan as one that “matches MoviePass’ latest.”

Sinemia offers a variety of other options, ranging from $3.99 per month for one ticket, to $14.99 for three tickets, with IMAX and 3D access.

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Google’s Wear OS gets a new look

Wear OS, Google’s smartwatch operating system that was once called Android Wear, is getting a new look today. Google says the overall idea here is to give you quicker access to information and more proactive help. In line with the Google Fit redesign, Wear OS now also provides you with the same kind of health coaching as the Android app.

In practice, this means you can now swipe through multiple notifications at once, for example. Previously, you had to go from one notifications card to the next, which sound minor but was indeed a bit of a hassle. Like before, you bring up the new notifications feed by swiping up. If you want to reply or take any other action, you tap the notification to bring up those options.

Wear OS is also getting a bit of a Google Now replacement. Simply swipe right and the Google Assistant will bring up the weather, your flight status, hotel notifications or other imminent events. Like in most other Assistant-driven interfaces, Google will also use this area to help you discover other Assistant features like setting timers (though I think everybody knows how to use the Assistant to set a time given that I’m sure that’s 90% of Assistant usage right there).

As for Google Fit, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Wear OS is adapting the same circle design with Hear Points and Move Minutes as the Android app. On a round Wear OS watch, that design actually looks quite well.

While this obviously isn’t a major break from previous versions, we’re definitely talking about quality-of-life improvements here that do make using Wear OS just that little bit easier.

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Storage provider Cloudian raises $94M

Cloudian, a company that specializes in helping businesses store petabytes of data, today announced that it has raised a $94 million Series E funding round. Investors in this round, which is one of the largest we have seen for a storage vendor, include Digital Alpha, Fidelity Eight Roads, Goldman Sachs, INCJ, JPIC (Japan Post Investment Corporation), NTT DOCOMO Ventures and WS Investments. This round includes a $25 million investment from Digital Alpha, which was first announced earlier this year.

With this, the seven-year-old company has now raised a total of $174 million.

As the company told me, it now has about 160 employees and 240 enterprise customers. Cloudian has found its sweet spot in managing the large video archives of entertainment companies, but its customers also include healthcare companies, automobile manufacturers and Formula One teams.

What’s important to stress here is that Cloudian’s focus is on on-premise storage, not cloud storage, though it does offer support for multi-cloud data management, as well. “Data tends to be most effectively used close to where it is created and close to where it’s being used,” Cloudian VP of worldwide sales Jon Ash told me. “That’s because of latency, because of network traffic. You can almost always get better performance, better control over your data if it is being stored close to where it’s being used.” He also noted that it’s often costly and complex to move that data elsewhere, especially when you’re talking about the large amounts of information that Cloudian’s customers need to manage.

Unsurprisingly, companies that have this much data now want to use it for machine learning, too, so Cloudian is starting to get into this space, as well. As Cloudian CEO and co-founder Michael Tso also told me, companies are now aware that the data they pull in, whether from IoT sensors, cameras or medical imaging devices, will only become more valuable over time as they try to train their models. If they decide to throw the data away, they run the risk of having nothing with which to train their models.

Cloudian plans to use the new funding to expand its global sales and marketing efforts and increase its engineering team. “We have to invest in engineering and our core technology, as well,” Tso noted. “We have to innovate in new areas like AI.”

As Ash also stressed, Cloudian’s business is really data management — not just storage. “Data is coming from everywhere and it’s going everywhere,” he said. “The old-school storage platforms that were siloed just don’t work anywhere.”

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Cleo Capital sets $10M target to fund female entrepreneurs

Sarah Kunst has filed to raise $10 million for her debut venture capital fund, Cleo Capital. According to Axios, the firm will give cash to female entrepreneurs who will act as scouts. 

Scouts look for viable early-stage startups for firms to invest in and then receive a cut of the profits on the investments. Kunst, pictured above, is a scout for Sequoia; it’s unclear if that will change now that she’s running her own firm. She’s also the founder of ProDay, a fitness tech startup that had raised at least $500,000 from angel investors, including Arielle Zuckerberg, but folded earlier this year.

We’ve reached out to Kunst for comment.

Cleo isn’t the only female-focused fund with which Kunst is involved. She joined Bumble as a senior adviser in February, and earlier this month, the popular dating app announced the launch of a VC fund targeting early-stage startups with women at the helm. Kunst is co-leading fund strategy alongside Bumble’s COO, Sarah Jones Simmer.

It’s no surprise Kunst is working to deploy capital to the next generation of female-founded companies. She’s been actively championing female and minority founders at least for the last several years and was one of the most vocal in the industry during tech’s #MeToo moment.

She spoke to The New York Times last year about her experience with 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, who sent her inappropriate messages on Facebook in 2014. McClure followed up with a public apology in the form of a Medium post titled “I’m a creep. I’m sorry,” and shortly after resigned from the accelerator. 

Kunst spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt last year a few months after The New York Times piece was published. On a panel focused on diversity in tech, she called out tech founders for a lack of diverse hiring practices: “I do this crazy thing that is hiring people that aren’t just white dudes. It works really great — you guys should try it,” she said.

In 2017, only 11.3 percent of partners at VC firms were women, according to PitchBook data. Female founders, meanwhile, raised just 2.2 percent of all venture funding.

On the bright side, it looks like more women are fundraising on the other side of the table. Women-run VC firms have gathered nearly $2.5 billion so far this year, putting them on pace to surpass last year’s decade high of $3.2 billion. That includes Cowboy Ventures’ $95 million fundraise and Aspect Ventures’ $181 million sophomore vehicle. Cowboy is led by Aileen Lee, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, while Aspect is co-led by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing director Jennifer Fonstad and former Accel partner Theresia Gouw.

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Another food delivery startup, Foodsby, rakes in venture capital funding

Venture capitalists are still hungry for food delivery startups.

Foodsby, the provider of a lunch delivery service based out of Minneapolis, has raised a $13.5 million Series B led by Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking. Greycroft Partners, Corazon Capital and Rally Ventures also participated. With the new capital, Foodsby plans to expand to 15 to 25 new markets. The round brings Foodsby’s total raised to $21 million.

“We have established a successful model for new market entry with a tried and true combination of talent and technology,” Foodsby founder and CEO Ben Cattoor said in a statement. “We look forward to building on our early successes and learnings to deliver continued growth for our investors and our team.”

Founded in 2012, the company connects employees in office buildings in 15 cities with local restaurants. How it works: A hungry worker uses Foodsby to pre-order a meal from a restaurant in its network, Foodsby aggregates all the orders it receives, sends the orders to the restaurants and the restaurants then make all the deliveries at once, streamlining what can be a logistically complicated process. 

That strategy, the company says, sets Foodsby apart from competitors. Because Foodsby only works with businesses and has restaurants make the deliveries rather than its own fleet of delivery agents, the overall costs of the operation are lower. It’s free to join the Foodsby network as both a company that wants to provide the service to its employees and as a restaurant. Deliveries cost $1.99 per person. 

While continued VC support may give the company a vote of confidence, the food delivery space is crowded and competitive. Foodsby is not unlike Peach, a Seattle-based office lunch delivery service that shed one-third of its staff in March. Peach had also landed VC support, raising about $11 million from Madrona and others. Munchery, another similar meal delivery service, also looks to be in hot water, laying off 30 percent of its workforce in May and ceasing operations in Los Angeles, Seattle and New York.

Food delivery startups are hit or miss, but VCs continue to flock to investment rounds in hopes of betting on the next Uber of food delivery — though Uber itself is really the Uber of food delivery, its food delivery service is reportedly the most profitable arm of the ride-hailing giant. And Uber, much like Amazon, is not a company you want to be going head-to-head with. 

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New Knowledge just raised $11 million more to flag and fight social media disinformation meant to bring down companies

Back in January, we told you about a young, Austin, Tex.-based startup that fights online disinformation for corporate customers. Turns out we weren’t alone in finding it interesting. The now four-year-old, 40-person outfit, New Knowledge, just sealed up $11 million in new funding led by the cross-border venture firm GGV Capital, with participation from Lux Capital. GGV had also participated in the company’s $1.9 million seed round.

We talked yesterday with co-founder and CEO Jonathon Morgan and the company’s director of research, Renee DiResta, to learn more about its work, which appears to be going well. (They say revenue has grown 1,000 percent over last year.) Our conversation, edited for length, follows.

TC: A lot of people associate coordinated manipulation by bad actors online with trying to disrupt elections here in the U.S. or with pro-government agendas elsewhere, but you’re working with companies that are also battling online propaganda. Who are some of them?

JM: Election interference is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of social media manipulation. Our customers are a little sensitive about being identified, but they are Fortune 100 companies in the entertainment industry, as well as consumer brands. We also have national security customers, though most of our business comes from the private sector.

TC: Renee, just a few weeks ago, you testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about how social media platforms have enabled foreign-influence operations against the United States. What was that like?

RD: It was a great opportunity to educate the public on what happens and to speak directly to the senators about the need for government to be more proactive and to establish a deterrent strategy because [these disinformation campaigns] aren’t impacting just our elections but our society and American industry.

TC: How do companies typically get caught up in these similar practices?

JM: It’s pretty typical for consumer-facing brands, because they are so high-profile, to get involved in quasi-political conversations, whether or not they like it. Communities that know how to game the system will come after them over a pro-immigration stance for example. They mobilize and use the same black market social media content providers, the same tools and tactics that are used by Russia and Iran and other bad actors.

TC: In other words, this is about ideology, not financial gain.

JM: Where we see this more for financial gain is when it involves state intelligence agencies trying to undermine companies where they have nationalized an industry that competes with U.S. institutions like oil and gas and agriculture companies. You can see this is the promotion of anti-GMO narratives, for example. Agricultural tech in the U.S. is a big business, and on the fringes, there’s some debate about whether GMOs are safe to eat, even though the scientific community is clear that they’re completely safe.

Meanwhile, there are documented examples of groups aligned with Russian intelligence using purchased social media to circulate conspiracy theories and manipulate the public conversation about GMOs. They find a grain of truth in a scientific article, then misrepresent the findings through quasi-legitimate outlets, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that are in turn amplified by social media automation.

TC: So you’re selling software-as-a-service that does what exactly?

JM: We have a SaaS product and a team of analysts who come out of the intelligence community and who help customers understand threats to their brand. It’s an AI-driven system that detects subtle social signs of manipulation across accounts. We then help the companies understand who is targeting them, why, and what they can do about it.

TC: Which is what?

JM: First, they can’t be blindsided. Many can’t tell the difference between real and manufactured public outcry, so they don’t even know about it when it’s happening. But there’s a pretty predictable set of tactics that are used to create false public perception. They plant a seed with accounts they control directly that can look quasi-legitimate. Then they amplify it via paid automation, and they target specific individuals who may have an interest in what they have to say. The thinking is that if they can manipulate these microinfluencers, they’ll amplify the message by sharing it with their followers. By then, you can’t put the cat back in the bag.  You need to identify [these campaigns] when they’ve lit the match, but haven’t yet started a fire.

At the early stage, we can provide information to social media platforms to determine if what’s going on is acceptable within their policies. Longer term, we’re trying to find consensus between governments and also social media platforms themselves over what is and what isn’t acceptable — what’s aggressive conversation on these platforms and what’s out of bounds.

TC: How can you work with them when they can’t even decide on their own policies?

JM: First, different platforms are used for different reasons. You see peer-to-peer disinformation, where a small group of accounts drives a malicious narrative on Facebook, which can be problematic at the very local level. Twitter is the platform where media gets its pulse on what’s happening, so attacks launched on Twitter are much more likely to be made into mainstream opinion. There are also a lot of disinformation campaigns on Reddit, but those conversations are less likely to be elevated into a topic on CNN, even while they can shape the opinions of large numbers of avid users. Then there are the off-brand platforms like 4chan, where a lot of these campaigns are born. They are all susceptible in different ways.

The platforms have been very receptive. They take these campaigns much more seriously than when they first began looking at election integrity. But platforms are increasingly evolving from more open to more closed spaces, whether it’s WhatsApp groups or private Discord channels or private Facebook channels, and that’s making it harder for the platforms to observe. It’s also making it harder for outsiders who are interested in how these campaigns evolve.

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Facebook has committed to using 100% renewable power for global operations by 2020

Earlier today, Facebook said that it has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent and using 100 percent renewable energy to power global operations at the social networking giant by the end of 2020.

So, while the company may have problems keeping foreign nationals from using the platform for influence operations (or garbage influencers from engaging in influence operations), at least they’ll be doing it with less of an effect on climate change.

Facebook gave itself a well-deserved pat on the back for its pace of acquiring renewable energy. The company bought over 3 gigawatts of new solar and wind energy since its first renewable energy purchase in 2013 (that includes 2.5 gigawatts in the past 12 months alone — a rate of acquisition that makes the intervening years look… well… kind of paltry).

What’s especially good about the Facebook renewable purchases is that they’re not just offset agreements — deals where a company buys renewable energy in some far-flung geography to offset the power they’re buying in local markets that relies on traditional carbon-based fuel sources.

“All of these wind and solar projects are new and on the same grid as our data centers,” the company said. “That means that each of these projects brings jobs, investment and a healthier environment to the communities that host us — from Prineville, Oregon, and Los Lunas, New Mexico, to Henrico, Virginia, and Luleå, Sweden.”

The targets that Facebook is making public today are part of the company’s commitment to the Paris Agreement through the “We Are Still In” initiative, the company said.

For Facebook, the announcement is something of a victory lap. Back in 2015, the company set a goal of having 50 percent of its power supplied to facilities from renewable energy sources by 2018. It actually hit that target in 2017.

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